Weekend Reading: The Legacy of Nazi Science, An Argentine Rebel, and More

What if much Nazi-era medical research was less like the widely condemned atrocities of Josef Mengele and more like the case of Henrietta Lacks, in which unethical circumstances led to a lasting scientific legacy? According to Emily Bazelon’s sprawling new article in Slate, “The Nazi Anatomists,” it often was. Bazelon examines not Mengele’s infamous twin studies and their ilk but how the bodies of dissidents and others whom the Germans executed “continue to haunt German and Austrian science,” quietly persisting in forms that range from tissue samples to a respected anatomical atlas. They haunt Americans, too, Bazelon writes, having indirectly laid the foundation for some right-wingers’ claims that rape cannot make a woman pregnant.

“To the outside world he’s a secret, and to the inside world he’s a different secret, and in each of these worlds he has secret colleagues—dirtbags and saints,” writes Jeanne Marie Laskas in a GQ story about Special Agent Charles Hunt (who is so much of a secret that “Charles Hunt” is a pseudonym). Hunt works on murder-for-hire cases for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but Laskas more precisely and pithily sums up his job description as “the hit man, who is not really a hit man.” Enormous and knuckle-ringed, with a ZZ Top beard, Hunt, an ex-cop and former infiltrator of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, ushers us into the topsy-turvy realm of people like him: A.T.F. employees who manage to pass as killers.

Stephen Phelan, reviewing a new translation of “Operation Massacre,” a sort of Argentine proto-“In Cold Blood,” in the Boston Review, also introduces us to a liminal character. Rodolfo Walsh was “a self-taught sleuth and code breaker, an award-winning fiction author turned investigative reporter, an artist and intellectual who took up a gun against his own government,” Phelan writes. Walsh was born in 1927 in Patagonia; he died in 1977 after writing a manifesto critical of the right-wing junta—but when Phelan, decades later, moves to Buenos Aires, he finds that Walsh’s spirit lives on, provoking controversy in a nation with a fraught relationship to its past.

Rany Jazayerli, in an essay for Grantland pegged to the premiere of the film adaptation of “Ender’s Game,” writes about the author Orson Scott Card and his science-fiction classic—whose central theme of tolerance, Jazayerli argues, “is the best repudiation of everything for which Card has come to stand.” Card has expressed homophobic, Islamophobic, and other hateful beliefs that Jazayerli, a Muslim who grew up in nineteen-eighties Kansas (“ I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager”) tries to square with an author he thought he knew and loved, and even corresponded with. “Maybe,” Jazayerli writes, “Card decided at some point that the price of empathy was better borne by his characters than by himself.”